The Evacuee Summer

by Katie King

  But the piglet – a little male who was soon named Porky Pig in honour of the Looney Tunes children’s favourite, although this was quickly shortened to Porky – was too little to be left outside on his own in the pen, and so he was placed in a large wooden tea chest close to the range to keep warm, with an old woolly of Mabel’s to snuggle in, that had been deemed too ratty for it to be unpicked and knitted up into something else.

  Porky quickly snuffled his way into everyone’s hearts, causing Roger to say to Mabel, ‘I don’t think he’ll be making our pigs-in-blankets come Christmas’, to which Mabel answered, ‘Lawks a mussy! Don’t say that, Roger! ’E’ll eat us out of ’ouse an’ ’ome if ’e don’t go fer sausages.’

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t tell you, when you are feeding him his own little Christmas dinner,’ said Roger with a twinkle in his eye, and then he spent quite a while tickling Porky under the chin until the piglet’s boot-button intelligent eyes drifted shut.

  Porky was fed milk every two hours from a rubber-teated dolly’s bottle that Mabel, who had grown up on a farm and therefore had experience of dealing with abandoned baby animals, had mixed with a beaten egg and a few drops of cod-liver oil.

  The children were warned there was a high chance that Porky wouldn’t survive as pigs tended not to do well away from their mothers.

  ‘We mus’ remember though,’ Mabel told the children, ‘that where there’s life, there’s ’ope, an’ so we mustn’t gi’ up ’ope on this little one jus’ yet. Now, who’s goin to ’elp wi’ t’ piglet’s feedin’ an’ gubbins?’

  Everyone was going to chip in with this, it seemed, and so an hour was spent at the kitchen table after tea one day with the children dividing their duties between Porky and Milburn, and allocating who was doing what.

  Porky turned out to be quite the little trooper though, and he thrived on his bottle feeding, and soon learned to give a snorty call to arms when he was hungry and wanted some more. There had been a debate between Roger and Mabel over whether the children should get up to feed him during the small hours of the night. Roger’s feeling was that they should be allowed to give it a go as it was probably time the children started feeling responsible for somebody else, and in any case they needed something to distract them from the grim news headlines on the progress of the war, won out over Mabel’s insistence that the children were too young to carry such a heavy responsibility and they slept too deeply to be easily roused in the middle of the night.

  Roger spoke very seriously to Tommy and his pals, saying this night-time feeding wasn’t anything they should undertake lightly as Porky’s life depended on them living up to their promise to look after him. And they would be tired the following day if they had been on night-time duties although they weren’t to moan about feeling sleepy or allow themselves to act grumpily. Larry pointed out that with six of them to share the feeds across each week, it meant that they could catch up on their sleep before they had to do it again.

  To Mabel’s surprise and Roger’s delight the system actually turned out to work surprisingly smoothly, and Porky never missed a feed. The children tried not to give Mabel I-told-you-so looks, but it was hard not to gloat.

  Gracie told Connie and Angela that looking after Porky was a bit like her own duties looking after her baby, although it was harder with a baby as Gracie had to do her own night-time feeding with Jack each and every night, whether she were tired or no. ‘So if yer don’t like feelin’ tired, then you’d better watch what you get up to with t’ lads when you’re older,’ she ended darkly, and both Connie and Angela looked as if they really meant it when they assured Gracie that they were never ever going to kiss a boy, let alone do anything that might lead to a baby, whatever that might be.

  Peggy caught Gracie’s eye, and they shared a smile over the look of horror on the girls’ faces, and Peggy thought she’d try to find an opportunity to say something similar to the lads. They were a bit young maybe, and she wasn’t quite sure who knew what about how babies were made as some of their fellow pupils came from farms and so presumably would have much more of a biological knowledge that they had most likely passed on. Anyhow, in a mixed household of largely unrelated children perhaps it was sensible to start mentioning this sort of thing, as they wouldn’t be children for ever and, heavens above! Peggy absolutely didn’t want to break the news a few years down the line to Barbara and Ted that one of the twins was about to become a parent.

  There was a balance to be struck, perhaps, about not giving the children too much information and therefore making this sort of thing sound inviting and something they should experiment with as soon as possible, and neither Connie nor Angela were developed enough to have started their menstruation yet, and so there probably were some months of grace. Still, Peggy inclined more to Gracie’s view which was that she, Gracie, would never have fallen pregnant at just fifteen had she known a bit more about the birds and the bees before dabbling with Aiden’s older brother Kelvin, which was clear proof that ignorance was no preventer of pregnancy.

  In an attempt to lighten the mood at Tall Trees a little, Roger buckled one day after the children had been particularly tetchy at breakfast, and he promised a day out to the seaside at Withernsea as it seemed to him to be about the least likely place to attract the attentions of Jerry. As he said to Peggy, he thought the children were going a bit stir-crazy as they had been cooped up too long and that they needed to go somewhere where they could see something a bit different and run off a bit of energy.

  The children were thrilled about something as carefree as a visit to the coast as they felt that, although Roger sometimes organised afternoon outings for all of them, arguably he was slightly too keen that what they actually did during those hours en masse away from Tall Trees should be ‘self-improving’.

  However, two gravely poorly parishioners and a broken water pipe that flooded the church hall meant that the trip to the coast had to be abandoned as Roger couldn’t be spared, and neither could Mabel who had an important week filled with a lot of ATS organisational responsibilities, which disappointed everybody as Roger and Mabel were the only people in the household who knew how to drive. Peggy was cross with herself as she had never had the need to learn, and this made her think that she really should put this right at some point soon.

  None of the London children had ever been to the seaside and so they were especially disappointed that their day out had been scuppered, while Aiden and Tommy, who had both been to Withernsea several years earlier on a school trip, looked almost as dejected.

  Egging each other on to even lower ebbs and becoming more down in the mouth, later in the day when Roger had broken the news to the kiddies about the cancelled trip, Connie and Aiden had trudged over to the hospital to drop off the latest batch of homemade bags for the patients’ possessions, and when James noticed their long faces and unusually quiet demeanour, he asked them what had happened.

  The result was that later that evening James telephoned Roger, and offered his services as driver and host for the day out. James said that he was owed a day off, having worked for three weeks solid without a break, and so he’d love to have a blast of sea air, and as luck would have it there was an old charabanc that a friend owned and that he could borrow if Roger could siphon off some of his own petrol to help with the fuel, and provided Peggy would come to help him chaperone the children.

  ‘I doubt we’ll be able to get onto the beach itself,’ James pointed out, ‘as there’s likely to be a variety of defences laid in the sand in order to hinder any attempted invasion on the part of Jerry. But it will be a nice day out and pleasant walking, and the smell of salt air and raucous seagulls. We can take a picnic and have fish and chips on the way home.’

  ‘It’ll give the children change to let off some steam and do something different,’ agreed Roger. ‘I might be able to help a little with the petrol.’

  When Roger told Mabel, she agreed it was a good idea, and then before speaking to Peggy, Mabel telephoned June Blen
kinsop to mention that Peggy would be needed for one day for a trip with the family, if that was all right with June. June twigged immediately that Mabel was trying to cheer up a still downhearted-over-Bill Peggy, and so she agreed immediately, and even offered to provide some of the food for the picnic.

  And so the trip out was rearranged for the next Friday, with Peggy and Holly to go, along with all the children. Gracie and Jack were invited too, but Gracie couldn’t get cover for herself at the nursery, her daytime stint at the greengrocers, or for her evening session at the gun-packing depot.

  Peggy was the last to know, and surprised and then a bit irritated about the way everything had been arranged without her say-so – ‘Well, I think that’s a bit of a liberty, and I’m not sure I do want to go,’ she bridled – but then quite snappishly Gracie told her to ‘gi’ over’ and that she and Jack would take Peggy’s place if that was going to be her attitude.

  Peggy’s stomach did a little flip, and she realised that she really did want to go, rather a lot in fact, and she was going to be distinctly peeved if it were Gracie who went in her place, and so then Peggy had to bite a bit of humble pie and cut in quickly with, ‘Let’s not be too hasty, as I think I might be able to squeeze it in.’ She had to look down then as she found her cheeks flushing on the cerise side of rose-pink, which had the advantage that she didn’t see the look that Mabel and Gracie exchanged that was very clearly a private acknowledgement between the two women that Gracie knew all along she couldn’t get time off work in order to muscle in on the day-out action but that she had thought that Peggy had needed a nudge in the right direction in order to buck her ideas up. And so in fact a rather successful ruse had been carried out that Mabel secretly applauded Grace for.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  On Friday morning the weather wasn’t brilliant when James tooted the charabanc’s horn outside Tall Trees. The sky was full of grey clouds, but it wasn’t yet seven in the morning and so Peggy hoped the weather was going to perk up.

  As Roger went to deal with the petrol situation, Mabel broke from giving Porky his bottle, at which he squealed in disgust, to give Peggy a hand putting mackintoshes, gumboots and umbrellas in the charabanc in case of rain, as well as calamine lotion and sun hats if the sun started to blaze, a number of towels (just in case) and several tartan woollen rugs for them to sit on when they had their picnic. They weren’t able to fit the perambulator into the charabanc no matter how hard they all tried manoeuvring it in and moaned about it not folding up, and so Peggy resigned herself to spending the day holding Holly, which was a nuisance, she sighed to herself, as Holly was getting quite heavy these days.

  The children clambered on board, and Mabel (who was now holding a peckish Porky in her arms as he greedily guzzled the last of his morning bottle) and Roger waved them off, with James peeping the horn in reply.

  ‘Yes, the neighbours are going to be most delighted with all this commotion first thing,’ joked Peggy, and she was pleased to see that she made James laugh. She remembered very clearly how peevish the neighbours had made her when they’d been all too ready to come out and watch her barney with Maureen, and so Peggy thought the noise they’d made cutting through the early morning was their just desserts for being nosy. Then she had to admit to herself that if she too had heard such a commotion coming from somebody else’s driveway, then she’d have been right out too to see what was going on.

  A couple of minutes later they pulled up at June Blenkinsop’s and June ran out with several wicker baskets of food that she had got ready for them and, as a surprise for Peggy, a huge square of material that she told Peggy a customer who had spent time in Africa had seen women using to carry their babies in a sling, as June had never thought for a moment they’d be able to take the pram with them in the charabanc given how boxy and unwieldy it was, and so this could be a useful alternative. June gave Peggy a quick demonstration of how the woman had shown her the square of material should be knotted, and although Peggy felt a bit dubious about whether it would be secure enough to support Holly’s weight on its own, she thought she might give it a try if they were going to take the children for a walk as she could support Holly in the sling with her arms.

  It took about an hour and a half of chugging up hill and down dale to get to the coast (and they’d only needed the one stop at public conveniences on the way), and once they were there, the weather couldn’t have been more perfect. The sun’s heat was quickly burning off the cloud, but there was a gentle breeze and so the temperature felt pleasant rather than sweltering, while the smell of the sea was invigorating.

  James made sure the food was in the coolest place in the charabanc, and then, while Peggy breastfed then changed and popped Holly into a clean terry nappy square, he took the children to find the public conveniences (again), which turned out to be mercifully close. Next he escorted them on a short wander so that there could be a bit of running around after being cooped up in the charabanc and he could get his bearings of what Withernsea, which he’d never been to before, had to offer.

  After about half an hour they came back to collect Peggy and Holly, and there was a slightly awkward minute or two as James tried to help Peggy put Holly in the baby sling as per June Blenkinsop’s instructions. There was a moment when he was standing right in front of Peggy and was supporting Holly’s weight while Peggy knotted behind her waist the ends to the portion of material that would wrap over Holly’s bottom; it was a moment or two that felt to Peggy as if James were standing very near to her indeed, a feeling sharpened when he then reached up behind Peggy’s neck to help her securely tie the top two bits of material. Peggy felt peculiar at his close proximity, awkward but also full of a not unpleasant heightened awareness, with her skin fizzing at the slightest of his touches, as he gently turned her around so he could check that all the knots were secure and that Holly was in no danger of tumbling to the ground.

  James, however, gave no sign that he had even noticed he had been standing very near to Peggy as then he concentrated with what looked to Peggy like exactly the level of attention he’d shown when giving the children the blankets, a couple of umbrellas, a cricket set, and the baskets of food to carry.

  They set out, with James pushing Angela, and Peggy making sure she was hidden away at the back of the group while she regained her composure, although her skin felt as if it was repeatedly imagining James’s touch.

  As they strolled along in the soothing sunshine Peggy began to calm down. She realised how nice it was to be on a day out, even if nearly everything was closed and there were lots of depressing signs of it being wartime about, with signposts having been cut off close to the ground and rolls of barbed wire hooked on to wooden frames across the beach as far as the eye could see.

  The boys were fascinated with the technicalities of the defences, and kept a watch out for gun hides, while Angela and Connie wondered what it felt like to live so close to the sea.

  They kept more or less to the edge of the coast as they meandered along, and after quite a long walk they turned a little inland and found some shade under which they spread the blankets.

  ‘Let me take Holly for a while,’ James said, and Peggy gratefully handed her over, and then turned away to reorganise all the blankets as James told Holly what a clever girl she was.

  The boys started a game of Spies, and as James looked happy enough keeping Holly amused, Peggy said to Connie and Angela that if they wanted, the three of them could go for a walk all on their own, with no boys allowed. She remembered how at their age she’d loved to do something with her mother or indeed any older woman who was showing her a bit of attention, and so she hoped that the girls would feel similarly, which they seemed to as they chatted quite happily about all manner of things as Peggy pushed Angela’s chair.

  Later, after they had returned to the others and everyone had sat about in the sun for a little, James told Angela and Connie to set out the food and then he told Peggy he’d be just a few minutes, and he got up and walked qui
ckly off. When James came back he was clutching some lemonade and four small dark bottles of Mackeson stout, all of which he had got from the hole in the wall at a public house that he’d noticed a little way back.

  Peggy had laid Holly on one of the blankets, and Larry and Jessie had constructed a little frame from the cricket stumps wedged into the ground that Peggy was able to sling the piece of material between in order that Holly could be further protected from the rays of the sun by having her own little shadowy shelter within the shade that they were already sitting.

  It was discovered that nobody had thought to pack any drinking vessels, which meant their only recourse was that they all had to swig directly from the lemonade bottles. The children thought this to be a total riot, with a cheery Tommy leading the shanty chanting of ‘Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum’ that soon everyone joined in with as each new person took their drink. Peggy didn’t like to think of what Barbara would have had to say had she seen Connie and Jessie supping straight from a bottle, but as she saw how much fun this was giving all the children she thought that maybe it wouldn’t hurt too much, just this once.

  To her surprise, as ordinarily Peggy was the sort of person who was always able to eat something, she discovered that she wasn’t hungry. But she sipped her Mackeson with relish and contented herself with smiling now and again at everyone, and then she stretched out luxuriously and kicked off her sandals and raised her skirt to just above her knees so that her legs could catch a little sun. Then she closed her eyes, enjoying listening to the children chatter away as they ate their picnic and her eyelids felt heavier and heavier.

  When she woke up for the first time she could hear there was a game of cricket going on not too far away. The sound of leather on willow and of James coaching the children with Angela calling out the scores from where she was sitting beside James, sounded such a quintessentially British, pre-war past-time that it quickly lulled Peggy back to sleep, after she’d made sure that a still-napping Holly was fine, which she was, having had the baskets propped beside her by the others as a break should an errant cricket ball roll in her direction.